Tina Fey (l.) and Alec Baldwin during the live performance of '30 Rock' Thursday night.

NBC's "30 Rock" went live last night, and the cast seemed to be having as much fun as the audience.

Sometimes more.

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Bearing a suspicious resemblance to "Saturday Night Live," the alma mater of several key creators and performers, the live "30 Rock" laid most of its bets on short scenes and sketches featuring guest stars like Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jon Hamm.

The two strongest contenders for an actual plot seemed to be the staff forgetting Liz's 40th birthday and Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy announcing that he had given up alcohol.

The 40th birthday business, a series of recurring sketches, looped from Damon to Henry Winkler and mostly positioned Liz to play straight woman and segue between sketches.

Tracy Morgan's sketches seemed to border on slapstick when they were comprehensible. Jane Krakowski got more mileage out of a running threat to launch a "wardrobe malfunction."

Dressed in an iridescent teal suit that triggered flashbacks to "Star Wars" and slashed a long way down, Krakowski played the gag exactly right, as if the malfunction had already happened.

Like "SNL" and its fictional cousin on the show, "TGS," this "30 Rock" slipped in as many hit-and-run pop culture gags as it could. In one sketch, Morgan played President Obama guesting on a Fox News talk show, with the on-screen ID line reading "Exclusive Interview with Kenyan Liar."

Hamm, who has shown a real talent for comic timing when he isn't the so-not-funny Don Draper on "Mad Men," did a fake public service ad in which he extolled the virtue of executed criminals donating their hands to people who had lost their own.

It started funnier than it ended, but then, so do most "SNL" and "TGS" sketches.

If there were any egregious mistakes in the early edition - the cast did the show twice, for the East and West coasts - they weren't apparent.

At times, the cast did show the overenthusiasm that nerves can create, but on a comedy show, that's hardly the worst thing that can happen.

At one point, Liz was telling Tracy their show would never resort to obvious jokes like something unexpectedly going wrong. At that precise moment, a picture slipped on the wall behind them.

"Cheap, eh?" Liz half-muttered.

Well, maybe. But when everyone is having such a good time, who's counting?